Leaving Brooklyn (6 page)

“Is it too much to ask,” he would grumble to my mother, “to expect her to say hello to people who come to the house?”

This was invariably said in my presence the following day, and instead of answering his question directly my mother defended me. “Yes,” I wanted her to say, “it is too much to ask,” or even, “No, you have a right to expect that.” Either way, whichever she truly thought. It was worse to be defended. She talked about being true to one's self but her instinct was to evade.

Mr. Singer and Mr. Tessler, partners in a furniture business, looked alike, with their jowly cheeks and thick glasses and potbellies, the fourth button of their shirts tugging identically away from the fabric when they leaned back to study their cards. Lanky Mr. Capaleggio, who owned a service station in Queens, wore plaid flannel shirts and had thinning, rust-colored hair and was the only one who smoked a pipe, not cigars. Bald Mr. Ribowitz
was tall and skinny with a caved-in chest; I could always remember he had an electrical supplies store, because his head was like a bulb. Mr. Zelevansky and his wife, Belle, were my parents' closest friends. He was an accountant like my father, with thick lips and huge unruly gray eyebrows, and a small bluish scar on one cheek which I liked to think he had gotten in an excit-ing way, such as a barroom brawl over principles or defending someone from criminal attack, but knowing Brooklyn, I suspected it was probably a household accident.

I knew the men by their voices as well as their looks, and from upstairs in bed could distinguish the soft whine of Mr. Ribowitz, the gentle, phlegmy voice of Mr. Capaleggio, the gruff, conciliating tones of Mr. Zelevansky. The loudest voice was always my father's, bullying, prodding, reproaching, mocking, and I was amazed that the others tolerated him, but they did. For all the years of my childhood.

Pinochle. It didn't sound like English. It sounded inaccessible and dull, like business or taxes, a man's game. I learned to play gin rummy and hearts and canasta and Michigan rummy and poker, but never pinochle, with its cigars and soda and melding, whatever that was. Even the deck was peculiar, truncated, all the cards below the nine banished, as though the low numbers—the ages I was—were too negligible to bother with.

At the end of my skiing fantasies, on those Wednesday nights, I tumbled in and out of troubled sleep with the men's voices in my ears. Melding, Lend-Lease, the Marshall Plan, and Harry Truman, his marriageable daughter, his piano playing. And those words and the images they evoked, war-torn Europe and its starving children, “The Missouri Waltz,” lonely Margaret Truman doomed to spinsterhood, as well as the men themselves, paunchy and graying, mingled in my dreams with the skiing and the pain that was not really pain and the young doctors, till I would wake in the dark bewildered: Was I skiing or starving in Europe or home in bed? Was it almost time to line up in the school yard or was there still the whole night to pass?

From time to time there would be a card party. The card players' wives came along and played mah jongg while the men played pinochle, and I had to say hello to twice as many people, though it was not fully twice as agonizing. The women were easier: they were smaller and occupied less space than the men, for one thing, and they occupied their lesser spaces in a less proprietary way, only renting, as it were. They also greeted me in an easier way, as if I were one of them, only smaller still, while the men spoke to me as a member of another species, a house cat, perhaps, with language.

At some point I became aware of a flaw in the fearful symmetry of the card parties. One of the men—I figured out it was sallow Mr. Singer—did not have a wife attached to him. I asked my mother where she was and she brushed me off with one of her vaguenesses. That there might not be a Mrs. Singer didn't occur to me, since unmarried men over thirty were a rarity in Brooklyn, though as a matter of fact there was one right across the street who lived all by himself in a narrow attached row house exactly like ours and was friendly enough, but my mother told me to keep away from him, and later on in junior high there was a French teacher who we girls agreed was unmarried because he was too ugly for any woman to sleep with and moreover smelled bad. Apart from those, the category seemed not to exist, except for widowers. Was Mrs. Singer dead? I asked my mother, and she was vague about that too, though, a bit older now, I pressed her, pointing out there could be no vagueness regarding the question of someone's being dead or alive. She told me to mind my own business and I deduced that if Mrs. Singer were dead it must be of cancer or suicide, the two unmentionable ways to go about dying. I tried to imagine Mr. Singer's grief and loneliness, to bear it in mind when I greeted him, and get a fragrant whiff of drama and tragedy, but it was difficult to work up much emotion when I wasn't sure: my efforts might be wasted. Perhaps she was an invalid, vaporous like the heroine of a Victorian novel or the girl to whom I had brought the class
assignments. That would be another kind of drama, more subdued and poignant—but I never heard anyone ask how she was. If she was neither sick nor dead, it was quite possible the Singers were divorced, a situation that seemed to exist only outside Brooklyn, and that would bestow on Mr. Singer an aura of exoticism that, with his potbelly and straining shirt and jowly cheeks, I found him hardly qualified to bear. In any case her absence was convenient and even fortuitous, since the maximum number for a com-fortable mah jongg game is five.

On card party nights, in addition to the table in the living room for the men, another was set up in the adjacent dining room for the women. The rooms were connected by a wide arch, and now and then there was banter between the two groups, or perhaps the woman who was East or a man sitting out a hand would wander into the other sector—my father, particularly, liked to graze among the women—but for the most part the evening was spent in separate sectors, like Berlin, which had just been divided up by the Allies, as a punishment, apparently, and to keep Germany impotent and out of harm's way.

In bed I was the unseen audience for a symphony of social noises: the men's table sent up cannonades of belches from the soda consumed, and a crackling of nuts and chips, and the per-cussive slapping of cards and shuffling of the deck and the voices. Below those sounds was the muted, reedy tinkle of the ivory mah jongg tiles being tossed one by one to the center of the table, then periodically the livelier ensemble of many tiles sliding off the four racks to the center of the table, to be scrambled for the next hand and turned over face down; that was like soft hail on glass, or piano keys struck at random with the soft pedal down. I knew the sound of the tiles well because I helped my mother set up the game before the guests arrived—I would build little walls around each rack, then crash them down to hear the gentle avalanche—and she let me separate the money by color, too, tiny hexagonal plastic wafers in blue and red and green with holes in the middle like doughnuts, and stack them on the
little brass poles, attached to each rack, that had joints and could bend in four directions.

The women drank coffee rather than soda—I heard the amiable clink of their cups and saucers—and ate chocolate kisses and sugared fruit candies, orange and cherry and lime, in half-moon shapes with a white line around the arc, and their voices were higher and constant and more convivial: they didn't argue, or if they did it was in small, oblique grace notes, rarely confrontations.

When everyone had played enough, the bridge tables were folded, the extra leaves were put in the dining room table, and the men and women sat down together, husbands next to wives, as my mother brought out coffee and platters of smoked fish and salads. I would join them at the table and listen, friendly, detached, and curious, like an anthropologist, though anthropologists had not been heard of in Brooklyn. And while I enjoyed the food and the talk I secretly vowed that the life I would lead as an adult—as my unknown, not yet existing self; me, that is—far from Brooklyn, in Paris or Cairo, would not include anything resembling card parties. We—my unknown future friends, perhaps at this very moment mired in other Brooklyns but destined to be dark, gaunt, and intense—would not be married. We would sit on the floors of garrets drinking wine, smoking Turkish cigarettes, and talking of art and life. We would be living our lives in the fullest Jamesian sense.

Still later, not in Cairo, merely in Manhattan, after I learned to check on the times of movies so I could begin at the beginning, I also learned it was considered gauche for couples, married or not, to sit together at parties. People should get to know other people. But I knew that wasn't the real reason. A principle was operating in both cases: in the great world, a naughty, mercurial principle of divisiveness, entropy, and unsettling, and in Brooklyn the principle of cohesiveness, a valiant fight against the forces of entropy and division. And these contrary principles mirrored my eyes, the good eye with its seamless smooth coherent world,
everything fitting together in just and sensible, enduring relations, and the bad eye breaking things into parts, blurring proportions and distances and harmonies.

The only result of the consultations with the big men was that for a week or two my mother would repeat the exercises in the kitchen as she rolled out dough with her huge wooden rolling pin. I covered my left eye, and she held up fingers dusty with flour.

“Two?”

“Try again.”

“Maybe one? Three?”

“You did better in the doctor's office, I think. Are you sure you aren't teasing me?”

“Five?” I was bored. I molded shapes out of leftover dough.

“Come on, Audrey, you can do better.”

“Two.”

“To thine own self be true,” said my mother.

After these spasms of activism the eye was not mentioned.

Except for the notes.

Twice a year, at the same moment all over Brooklyn, teachers interrupted their lessons—the division of decimals, the Louisiana Purchase, the relationship between the highwayman and the landlord's black-eyed daughter—to hang eye charts over the map of the world, where our country was always at the center. Twice a year my mother sent a note to have me excused from the test.

I carried it to school like a boulder in my pocket and sat rigid, my cheeks ablaze, until my name was called. I felt the contours of my body cut through the heartless air as I navigated the aisle to the teacher's desk to hand her the note, and I felt the dozens of eyes on my back. Finally I got the idea of giving it to her first thing in the morning. She would read it, offer a doubting glance, and pass over me later when my turn came. Notes from home about health matters were incontrovertible, coming from a higher authority. The hierarchies of authority were
complex but everyone grasped them, just as we knew Rock, Paper, Scissors: scissors cuts paper, rock breaks scissors. If we children were paper and the teachers were scissors, home was rock. (Later, only later, paper would cover rock.)

My classmates might look around in surprise—had the teacher made a mistake?—unless they knew me from previous eye tests; one or two bold ones might even question me in a whisper. I whispered back that I didn't have to take the test, I went to a private doctor, echoing my mother's words in the note though they made no sense to me. Who was the private doctor? There were only the anonymous big men we visited, once each. It is perilous to speak someone else's words, above all when you don't understand them. The self vanishes for the moment, leaving you—whatever remains of you, a dumb animal sentience—unbearably weightless and adrift, yearning for your self to return, as a ball swept out by the tide sometimes returns on the next wave.

Twice a year I dreaded the eye test and longed to take it. My eye might well have been a social asset, a conversation piece, like an exotic disease that luckily didn't hurt. But my mother, who had no idea of the classroom's social assets, or of what were my pains and pleasures, wished only to shield me from humiliation. And I was her accomplice: I told her when the tests were scheduled. To do otherwise would have violated her vision of the world, and it was undeniably and irrevocably
her
vision,
her
world, that my good eye saw. In it she spoke with the voice of an oracle and knew which things were proper to enjoy and which caused pain. There were so many times when I longed to make her see what I saw; then we could inhabit the same world, our visions shared and mutually permeating like the atoms of the air. Later on there was one special time… But always, the world my bad eye saw was mine alone, invisible to everyone else in Brooklyn, especially to my mother. And I couldn't, back then, place my faith in it. I might choose what to read—the Harvard Classics instead of
Reader's Digest
—and what to dream—the handsome
doctor who awakened my battered body. But to trust that solitary vision, to act on my wayward feelings and cherish a different yardstick of pleasure and pain, was hardly possible in that smooth, cohesive place. It would have taken a leap as daring as the leaps of those poor children we read of in the papers every so often, who, after watching
Superman
, trusted the simmering in their bones, spread their wings, and gave themselves to air.

 

THE SUMMER I was fifteen years old—just before my senior year in high school, for I had skipped grades—a new thing under the sun appeared in Brooklyn. Contact lenses. My parents made inquiries. Apparently a lens could be designed that would fit my eye, magnify the iris to the same size as its partner, and discipline its wanderings. The lens would not correct my vision—not possible, the big men said—nor grant me the fabled perception of depth: its use would be purely cosmetic.

Somehow it was decided that I would get this contact lens. I don't recall any solemn sitting down to talk it over. Things would hang mutely in the air and then happen after a while, in Brooklyn; action would be taken, or more often not taken, like Frost's road in the poem I was required to memorize every year, as if no English teacher ever revealed her syllabus to her successor, or else there was a shortage of poems.